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Even at its most arch, its most urbane, the project is still resolutely, definitively pop in almost every sense.

New single 'I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler' is a case in point - witty, sci-fi songwriting with a synth pop gaze, it finds the Los Angeles duo back to their pithy, addictive, melodic best.

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Brandon Flowers - 'Still Want You'

We were raised to only say nice things or nothing at all. This song is just mild enough to keep our Topshop browsing experience flawless.

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Charlie Puth - 'One Call Away'

One-man boy band music! Not opposed to it in principle, but the melody here is so completely innocuous it sounds lifted from everywhere and nowhere at once. On a more serious note, we cannot deal with a single more pop song about how a nice strong man is ready and waiting to "save" his woman. From what? Dated, objectionable and boring.

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Nathan Sykes - 'Over and Over Again'

Did he seriously just sing "one plus one is two for life?" We made it one-third of the way through this song, which sounds like reality-show montage music, the kind of generically maudlin tinkling that plays when the loser is taking a limousine back to the actual world. It's probably representative of the current climate of recorded music that most of the stuff on this list so far sounds cynically engineered for retail environments and television: music with a neutral message adaptable to the messaging of any lifestyle brand.

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Everything Everything - 'No Reptiles'

This song sounds like a cross between Coldplay being vaguely experimental and a Scandinavian car commercial. We have a hard time with bands that take themselves this seriously. Not that music should always be fun, but balance is important. The world is fucked up, but it can also be deeply funny in spite - or because of - how fucked up it is.

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Stooshe - 'Lockdown'

This reminds me of the music that played in heavy rotation on MTV in Europe in the 1990s—which I'd watch for hours when visiting my family in France growing up, marveling at the robust parallel universe of pop music that rarely ever made it to the States. Hearing this is like discovering that alternate continuum's timeline never ended, like we're in the eternal 90s, which maybe we are. That said, I'll take classic pop girl groups like this over EDM DJs any day.

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Le Grind - 'Pillow Talk'

Solid. The bassline is undeniable, and there are a bunch of great ideas here that keep the song shifting in interesting ways. People don't do conversational intros and interstitial skits like this anymore, and it's refreshing to hear. Her voice reminds us of Blu Cantrell in "Hit 'Em Up Style." The most fun song on this list by a mile. There's still hope!

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'I Thought The Future Would Be Cooler' will be released on December 4th.